Lists of Nobel Prizes and Laureates

Lists of Nobel Prizes and Laureates

Alfred Nobel and His Interest in Literature

"A recluse without books and ink is already
in life a dead man"
- Alfred Nobel

During his lifetime, Alfred Nobel was undoubtedly more renowned
for his work as an inventor and industrialist than for his
interests in the arts. However, to understand his versatility,
his complex and at times contradictory nature, these interests
that were also vital to him have to be taken into account as
well.

There are thirteen red gilt-edged small volumes by Byron in
Nobel's library. Inside the first volume is a handwritten
poem in French from "Harriett". Who was Harriett? Who was
the receiver?

Although Nobel belonged to the realm of his work and inventions,
his second home was in literature and writing. After his death he
left a private library of
over 1500 volumes, mostly fiction in the original language, works
by the great writers of the 19th century, but also the classics
and works by philosophers, theologians, historians and other
scientists.

He also left a voluminous collection of
letters, a handful of poems he himself had written in his youth
and some early drafts of analytical novels, I ljusaste
Afrika (In Brightest Africa, 1861) and Systrarna (The
Sisters, 1862). Towards the end of his life, when his inventions
and business activities left him more time, he drafted the
outline of a satirical comedy, The Patent Bacillus (1895),
and published a tragedy, Nemesis (1896). Nobel's will, dated 1895, is the final
testimony to his lifelong love of poetry: one of the prizes was
to be awarded to "the person who shall have produced in the field
of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal
direction".

St. Petersburg (1842-1863)

During his education in St. Petersburg,
Alfred Nobel was taught by outstanding private tutors, mainly
chemistry and physics, but also literature and philosophy. He
proved to be a precocious pupil, exceptionally gifted, but quiet
and introvert. He learnt a great deal on his own - French by
translating Voltaire, first into Swedish and then back into
French and checking it against the original. He read the
Odyssey, Pushkin's verse epic Eugene Onegin and
Home of the Gentry by Turgenev in Russian. At the age of
17, he was not only fluent in Swedish and Russian but also in
French, English and German. The English romantics Wordsworth,
Shelley and Lord Byron, his "favourite poet", made a lasting
impression.

Lord Byron, the "favourite poet".

In the poem "You say I am a riddle",
which Nobel wrote during his first visit to Paris in 1851, you
find an echo of this romantic idealism. The poem, with its 319
lines of poetry written in English, is largely autobiographical.
It is dedicated to a "lovely girl", too early "wedded to her
grave". It begins:

You say I am a riddle - it may
be
for all of us are riddles unexplained.
Begun in pain, in deeper torture ended.
This breathing clay what business has it here?

Stockholm, Hamburg (1863-1873)

During the busiest periods of his life,
Nobel was forced to put his literary interests to one side,
especially at the beginning of his career when experiments,
financial problems, constant travelling and a growing industrial
empire absorbed most of his time. However, reading good
literature was his main form of relaxation and he always took a
book or two with him on his travels. One letter reveals that,
even as late as at the age of 35, when some projects had gone
awry, he considered abandoning business and his inventions and
taking up writing for his livelihood.

Paris (1873-1891)

Nobel settled in Paris, the capital of
culture, at the age of 40. "Every mongrel here smells of
civilisation", he noted with pleasure. Here he met Bertha
von Suttner (later founder of the Austrian peace movement), a
meeting which was to prove very important for Nobel, not because
of the peace issue alone. When she first visited his home on
Avenue Malakoff in 1876,
Bertha was struck by his "well-stocked library, capable of
satisfying the most divergent wishes". Her visit was brief, but
they maintained a lifelong intellectual friendship, mainly
through correspondence. His discussions with Bertha were to prove
stimulating - on literary matters as well. She never failed to
send him her works with a friendly dedication: "From your dear
friend and comrade-in-arms", "a testimony of our friendship".
Reading her work may well have influenced Nobel's own attitude to
literature in "an ideal direction". This could apply not only to
her description of society and her anti-war novel Die Waffen
nieder! (Lay down Your Arms!, 1889) - her "admirable
masterpiece", which he praised for its grand ideas and "charming
style" - but also to works such as Ein Manuscript!(1885),
where she reflected upon questions of a more private and
aesthetic nature.

Victor Hugo (at the window) lived in this
house on Avenue d'Eylau (now Avenue Victor Hugo), the same
street where Alfred Nobel's companion, Sofie Hess, lived.

Juliette Adam-Lamber, who maintained a literary salon, wrote
books and published the magazine La Nouvelle Revue, was
one of the few people whose company Nobel kept in Paris. He met
Victor Hugo at her home and probably also younger writers like
Pierre Loti, Paul Bourget and Maupassant. Both Bertha von Suttner
and Nobel had contacts with the literary circle linked to the
more academic magazine La Revue des Deux Mondes. It is
remarkable that despite his busy life he was able to keep up with
current literature, and at that time he systematically added to
his library contemporary literature not only in French but also
in English, German and the Scandinavian languages. He also
collected the classics in beautifully bound editions, Musset,
Tegnér, Shakespeare, Scott, Goethe, Schiller, all writers
that he quoted readily.

Madame Bovary is being dissected by Flaubert.
Cartoon by A. Loiriot

"Zola sat on a pile of dung and spread a terrible stench", he
joked. Nobel apparently felt distaste for naturalism; however, he
did appreciate the realism and psychological dissection in Le
Père Goriot (Father Goriot) and Eugénie
Grandet by Balzac, Madame Bovary by Flaubert and
Maupassant's sophisticated short stories. Among Norwegian writers
he preferred Ibsen and Bjørnson (Nobel
Prize 1903). His favourite Danish writer was the story-teller
H.C. Andersen. Turgenev and Tolstoy were the Russian writers he
valued. (There is no Dostoyevsky in his library.)

Among the French he most admired Victor Hugo, the pacifist and
the idealist, who felt such compassion for "les misérables",
the social outcasts. Nobel was also invited from time to time to
the aged laureate's home; they lived close to each other near the
Bois-de-Boulogne. On Hugo's 83rd birthday in 1885, Nobel sent the
Master the following telegram:

Vive et vive de longues années
... ("Great Master, long may you live to charm the world and
propagate your ideas about universal charity").

Alfred Nobel's note to Victor Hugo.

Nobel was sent Selma Lagerlöf'sGösta Berling's Saga by his niece, Ingeborg. To a
friend he wrote: "The novel is highly original, and although
events take an even more illogical course than in nature, as it
appears to us, the style still possesses an appeal that cannot be
praised too highly." In 1909 Selma Lagerlöf became the first
woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

A copy of Gösta Berling's Saga.

Alfred Nobel and August Strindberg were in Paris at the same time
in the mid-nineties. However, it does not seem as if the two ever
met. Nobel acquired, amongst other works,
Hemsöborna, Utopier and Le plaidoyer d'un fou
by Strindberg. It is not known what he thought of Strindberg the
writer, but his opinion as a professional chemist of Strindberg
the alchemist can be gleaned from the discreet corrections of
formulas he made in the margins of Strindberg's essay
Introduction à une chimie unitaire (Mercure de
France, October 1895).

Viktor Rydberg was the Swedish poet he held in greatest esteem.
Rydberg's writing "denotes nobility of soul and beauty of form",
he wrote. In another context Nobel described himself in the
words: "I am a misanthrope and yet utterly benevolent, have more
than one screw loose and am a super-idealist, a kind of ungifted
Rydberg, I digest philosophy better than food."

San Remo, Paris, Bofors (1891-1896)

Nobel's collection of books bears testimony
to both the depth and breadth of his reading, even in fields such
as philosophy, history, religion and the history of science. He
was familiar with Voltaire and Rousseau, the philosophers of the
Enlightenment. He studied positivism and Comte with particular
fervour, Comte's anti-religious and philosophical ideas about
society corresponding to a large extent with his own. He also
diligently inserted discreet pencilled annotations in
positivistically inspired works such as G.H. Lewe's History of
Philosophy, Hippolyte Taine's Les origines de la France
contemporaine and Henry Buckle's History of Civilisation
in England, as well as in Gibbon's worldwide success The
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Albert
Schwegler's Geschichte der Philosophie and Karl von
Rotteck's Allgemeine Weltgeschichte, with its rapturous
idealism and love of liberty. Voltaire, Gibbon and Taine were
almost certainly writers who appealed to him with their wit and
distinctly clear style. Likewise Spencer, the systematiser of the
modern philosophy of evolution, appealed to him too. However,
like the empiricist he was, he found Kant's metaphysics harder to
digest: "Kant's style is so heavy that after his pure reason the
reader longs for unreasonableness."

Darwin's On the Origin of Species can be found in his
library - naturally, one would like to comment. Nobel's criticism
of religion and his ideas on the evolution of man indicate the
strength of the impression made upon him by this work, by far the
most revolutionary of its time. His notes in Natürliche
Schöpfungsgeschichte by Ernst Haeckel, a contentious
defence of Lamarck's and Darwin's theory of evolution, speak for
themselves. Nobel's philosophical thoughts on atoms, the cosmos
and the development of the modern conception of the universe are
based on Democritus, Giordano Bruno, Leibniz's theory of monads
and von Humboldt's world-view. However, it must be emphasized
that Nobel, an inherent sceptic, always read with a critical eye
and reserve.

In 1891 Nobel was obliged to leave Paris. He settled in San Remo and in his old age, when he
was in poor health, he was able to resume his writing. He had
already started a socially critical novel before leaving St.
Petersburg, I ljusaste Afrika (In Brightest Africa),
where, in the guise of Monsieur Avenir, he sets out his political
ideas, and also the draft of a longer novel, Systrarna
(The Sisters), where he discusses faith and knowledge with the
free-thinker Oswald and questions the divinity of Christ. In 1895
he produced the draft of a farcical satire, The Patent
Bacillus, based on the dogmatism and bureaucracy he
experienced in England during the Cordite Case. Sarcastically he
notes: "Madam Justice has always had paralysis of the legs and
therefore she has always been terribly slow, but now that seems
to have affected her head as well, she appears to be too mad even
for a madhouse."

In March 1896 Nobel wrote to Bertha von Suttner to say
that he had completed a tragedy. "I have based my writing on the moving
story of Beatrice Cenci, but I have dealt with it very
differently from Shelley." When it comes to the plot and the
historical background he appears to have been influenced by the
Italian Guerrazzi's portrayal of Beatrice Cenci, which
Nobel read in a German translation, pen in hand. After
experimenting with a number of different alternatives, he finally
called the play Nemesis. 100 copies were published at his
own expense in Paris a few weeks after his death, but all copies
- bar three - were destroyed in accordance with his family's
wishes. It was felt that such a weak drama could not honour the
memory of such a prominent man. This assessment was probably not
entirely unfair; the dialogue of the play seems stilted, its
characterisation too black and white and the horrible revenge
scenes so bizarre, that the work can hardly be described as
tending towards the "ideal".

Nobel was in many respects a man of the
pen: he was continuously writing letters, noting down all kinds
of fanciful ideas and plans for inventions, philosophising over
the origin of the cosmos and the evolution of man, discussing
questions of faith and knowledge, war and peace. When he died, he
left an extensive collection of letters: business correspondence,
letters from his brothers and other close friends and relatives
and also copies of his own letters. At times he wrote twenty odd
letters a day. Over the years he became a proficient
correspondent, cleverly adapting language and style to the
recipient. Bertha von Suttner describes the beginning of their
correspondence in her memoirs: "Mr Nobel and I exchanged several
letters. He wrote soulful and intelligent letters, but in a
melancholic tone. He seemed to be unhappy, misanthropic, highly
cultured, and to own a deeply philosophical conception of the
world. A Swede, whose other mother tongue was Russian, he wrote
with the same accuracy and elegance in German, French and
English."

In his private letters he liked to portray himself as a sickly
old grumbler, ugly and unsociable. But they also bear testimony
to a moving concern for his nearest and dearest, especially his
mother and his brothers' children. In other letters his words can
seem very caustic. When his brother Ludvig asked him in 1887
whether he did not wish to contribute to a biography of the Nobel
family, his reply was: "For me writing biographies is impossible,
unless they are brief and concise, and these are, I feel, the
most eloquent. E.g. Alfred Nobel - pitiful halfling, should have
been suffocated by a humane doctor, when he made his wailing
entry into life. Greatest merits: keeping his nails clean
and never being a burden to anyone. Greatest defect: lack
of family, a happy disposition and a good stomach. Greatest
and only request: not to be buried alive. Greatest
sin: not worshipping Mammon. Important events in his
life: none."

Nobel was obviously fascinated by language. In his youth his
literary talents lay in poetry, later on in life in the
aphoristic and self-reflective. Concise expressions, pithy
observations, often spiced with pungent humour and merciless
self-criticism, were his distinguishing features.

Nobel's self-denial and misanthrophy were, however, balanced by a
solidly grounded belief in progress. Technological inventions and
scientific conquests would lead humanity forwards, and he seems
to have believed that good literature could play a dynamic role
in an "ideal direction".

* Åke Erlandsson was born in 1938.
School of Education: Ph.Lic. in History of Literature, lecturer at the University of Umeå, Sweden, and at the University
of Paris-Sorbonne (1971-73), School of Librarianship, chief librarian
of the Nobel Library of the Swedish Academy (1992-2001).
He has published inter alia: Litterära smakdomare (editor and co-author, 1987), Modern
fransk prosa (1993), Alfred Nobels bibliotek:
en bibliografi (2002). CD: Svensk Lyrik (co-editor and co-author, 1998).
Internet: The Private Library of Alfred Nobel, Nobelprize.org.

For more information about the Enlightenment, watch the virtual exhibition "The Enlightenment" at La Bibliothèque nationale de France.